Big Picture Trends from Mobile World Congress

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About 15 years ago, my friend Philippe Kahn called me up and wanted to show me something he was working on. Kahn is well known in PC circles for co-founding software company Borland and then shepherding major development tools during his tenure. Once he left Borland, however, Kahn began working on what was the first camera phone ever designed. When I met with him, he showed me a re-jiggered cell phone in which he had embedded a camera. We now look back on this development and realize that his project gave birth to the camera phones of today. He helped make the camera standard in almost all cell phones shipped worldwide.

I was reminded of this humble start for camera phones while sitting in a private analyst briefing with Nokia at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona last week. The company showed the new PureView 808 smartphone with a 41-megapixel camera and a Carl Zeiss Lens. The current trend has been to add higher resolution cameras to smartphones, but most companies have been doing so in a more evolutionary fashion, growing from 3MP cameras to about 12MP cameras over a five-year period.

But Nokia just threw down an imaging gauntlet, giving competitors an even higher imaging mountain to climb to keep up. The 808 is a Symbian phone and most likely will have limited appeal since this OS is fairly basic. Having a camera phone that zooms out to give you a brilliant image without any pixilation, though, is quite a technological feat and should be applauded.

This will trigger the first big trend from MWC. It will force smartphone makers who have been a bit timid in scaling up their imaging sensors to include better cameras in many new models. In fact, it should spur all of the camera phone vendors to include larger imaging sensors faster than in the past. While I doubt they can get to 41MP soon, all will now be pushed to put better quality cameras at least in their upper-end models.

The second big trend I saw at MWC was more creativity within the hybrid category of products. Asus wowed the audience with its new PadFone, a smartphone that can be put into a tablet and then docked into clamshell like keyboard. My colleague from PCMag, Chloe Albnesius, who was also at MWC, wrote a detailed overview describing how this product that is worth reading.

I was also impressed with Asus' Prime, a tablet with a detachable keyboard that turns into a clamshell. I also really like Motorola's lapdock and its Webtop OS. It allows users to plug a Motorola smartphone into the back of the lapdock, turning it into a pretty powerful laptop in its own right.

All of these products come under the heading of hybrids and in the past, most of these hybrids were too underpowered to be taken seriously. Over the last 18 months, however, these products have taken advantage of new processors, new TFT screen technology, and new docking schemes. I believe that this hybrid concept has real potential. We are still in the early stages, but each generation gets better and more innovative and I believe this trend is here to stay.

The third trend I noticed at MWC was in the area of what will eventually be branded browser- or Web-based mobile computing. Mozilla made a most interesting announcement at the show about its new HTML Web-based mobile OS called Boot To Gecko. This is an important development because this new OS will go head-to-head with iOS, Android, and Windows Phone OS. However, this OS is actually following a major trend; HTML and Web apps could be destined to be the way we get past OS and app fragmentation and make it possible for an HTML-based Web operating system to deliver any Web app on any future smartphone.

Since this comes from Mozilla, it is an open-source project and it could become a very robust mobile OS in time. Every software developer I talk to expects to create Web app versions of their products in the future. If true, this would mean that we could welcome hundreds of thousands of Web apps into this ecosystem and drive a Web-based OS like this into the mainstream fairly quickly.

Of course, the catch here is that for this to work, the device has to have Internet connectivity all of the time, so this will not happen over night. Everybody believes, however, that we are marching toward ubiquitous connectivity and if so, an HTML-based Web OS like Boot To Gecko would be important.

One other thing I picked up from talking to vendors and ODMs at MWC is that we are probably not too far from being able to create a Web-only tablet that could be in the $99 to $149 price range. Many saw Boot To Gecko as a good OS for low cost tablets. This would not happen yet this year, but from what I was told, we should anticipate at least a couple of pretty robust Web-based tablets to launch at MWC next year.

If so, dedicated e-book readers could be a thing of the past, only appealing to a few hardcore readers. Web tablets that can both serve as readers and surf the Web at this price could easily supplant those bookworms.

Although I have been to Spain and Barcelona many times in the past, this was my first MWC. I was surprised at how large and extremely crowded it was. It looks like it will become the epicenter of new smartphone and tablet launches in the future and the show's importance will only grow.

Tim Bajarin is one of the leading analysts working in the technology industry today. He is president of Creative Strategies (www.creativestrategies.com), a research company that produces strategy research reports for 50 to 60 companies annuallya roster that includes semiconductor and PC companies, as well as those in telecommunications, consumer electronics, and media. Customers have included AMD, Apple, Dell, HP, Intel, and Microsoft, among many others. You can e-mail him directly attim@creativestrategies.com.

Tim Bajarin is recognized as one of the leading industry consultants, analysts, and futurists covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Mr. Bajarin has been with Creative Strategies since 1981 and has served as a consultant to most of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry including IBM, Apple, Xerox, Compaq, Dell, AT&T, Microsoft, Polaroid, Lotus, Epson, Toshiba, and numerous others. Mr. Bajarin is known as a concise, futuristic analyst, credited with predicting the desktop publishing revolution three years before it...
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